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Eastertime officially ends today. But the celebration never ends, because the good news of Jesus remains just as good. So the church calendar doesn’t simply run off the rails once it passes out of the three obvious seasons: Advent, Lent and Easter. It keeps moving forward into what used to be essentially the Season of Pentecost – a.k.a. the “season of the Church.” It’s the longest of all the seasons, including the time between Christmas and Lent and flowing forward from Pentecost through the feast of Christ the King at the end of November. Maybe it needs to be the longest season because it takes a lot of time and effort, and not a few mistakes, to fully embrace the call to be the church in the world.

Now the church isn’t normally considered among the world’s great superpowers. The Vatican doesn’t have a nuclear arsenal, and while the Jesuits might be the pope’s army, they aren’t packing heat (at lest, not to my knowledge!). Nations don’t quake in their boots when the pope makes a statement. Politicians running for office probably don’t worry about being beaten up by altar servers in a dark alley.

In general the authority of the church is gentle, soft, and invitational. It’s wielded by means of the pens of scholars, the typefaces of publishers, the homilies of pastors, the ministries of the sacraments, and works of charity and justice. The church asks and tells, seeks and finds, sometimes affirms through canonization and sometimes denounces through excommunication. But leaders in the church aren’t expected to behave like thugs who push and punish to get their ambitions realized and enrich their own coffers. Among the two modes of force, coercive and persuasive, the gospel method is always the latter.

So when the church spills out into the world’s streets, its testimony is strong and still tender. The message is couched in terms of love, compassion, unity, reconciliation, peace, justice, joy, and hope. Are these powerful words? You bet they are. Are they more powerful than guns and bombs and death threats? Yes, when you believe in a power that is stronger than death, stronger even than hell.

When Jesus arrives behind the locked doors of the upper room on East Sunday night, he brings the ultimate weapon with which to arm his followers to engage the battle ahead: the authority to forgive sins. Nothing ever invented can defeat this power. it breaks down walls erected within marriages, between parents and children, or one neighbor and another. Forgiveness can reunite a divided nation, or bring nations together at the table of good will. Forgiveness dissolves barriers between heaven and earth – and it can breach the boundary of death itself. Maybe the church is a superpower after all.